Mary Gaitskill

I think that's the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it's very mild.

People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn't because they're trying to fool you or because they're hypocrites. It's because they badly want to be that thing, and so they'll try to be it.

I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it.

Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness.

I wasn't ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, 'Why would I want to do that?'

What is faithfulness, anyway? Can you be unfaithful to your own feelings and faithful to someone else? Is it faithful to lie in bed night after night with someone you love but no longer desire while ardently dreaming of someone else?

Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs.

It's true that your environment influences how you write.

If anything is scary about my writing, it's that it's the product of a very particular vision and doesn't reference common speech that heavily. By 'common speech,' I don't mean language as much as an agreed-on way of seeing, or a shorthand.

Something like riding a horse - which I've recently started doing - requires courage, especially for me, as I started out being actually scared of horses.

It's scary to me to watch the world around us get less and less physical while in the imaginary world of pop culture, aggressive impulses and fear reactions are floridly, furiously stoked and indulged.

Between my hatred of mall shopping and my mother's firm ideas about how a girl should dress, my style choices were pretty unenthusiastic: plaid skirts or whatever empire-waisted thingamabob was on sale at Sears.